New games on old shit

The NES came out in China before consoles were banned there, and it sold pretty well. As a result, for a long time Chinese hackers would take games made on newer consoles and backport them to the NES, hacking older releases with newer content. The most famous, for instance, is FF7 NES: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII_(NES_video_game)
please use archive.is/2008/02/22/final-fantasy-vii-ported-to-the-famicom-finally/

This was then picked up by modders and further updated to better match the original: please use archive.is/2013/11/15/final-fantasy-7-unofficial-nes-port-restored-improved-by-modder/

I'm about to finish up my first homebrew cart. I made a clone of the board game Mastermind on the NES. The first cart I tried to make, I fucked up while desoldering the ROM. As a result, the solder connections for my ROMs are flaky and the graphics are fucked. I'm waiting for some new equipment before I try again on a new cart.

That second link is an old Engadget article, just google Engadget FF7 NES and it should come up.

Yeah, that's pretty sweet.

It'd be cool if though if there was some group of hardcore enthusiasts for X console who started just regularly cranking out quality games for said console

These days, it can't be that hard for someone with enough cash to try to actually start up a development studio that pulls some decent talent to try to really resurrect something like the SNES or the Saturn. Worst comes to worse, they could always eventually put the games up on a service like Steam eventually to make up for the costs of that initial limited production run.

There are communities that do that. For example, people still produce C64 games on floppy.

"Unholy Night" is a new SNES fighting game set to launch sometime this year.

So yeah..it happens.

The problem is that none of these will really "take off" because of a variety of factors, all related to the limited availability of the old hardware. It makes it harder to find people who have a working console and will buy a cartridge, harder to acquire a spare console for debugging/testing if any hardware mods are required, producing cartridges is expensive now just like it was then (and the cart printers are long gone, leaving you to either create a reasonable facsimile with expensive production or to tear apart an old cart and replacing the innards or rewriting the game data if that's possible)… it's just a pain.

The Dreamcast gets some attention because one, it has _terrible_ piracy prevention, making it easy to play burned CDs, and two, its media of choice is the CD, which are both stupid cheap to buy and ship in bulk and easy for even a relative luddite to figure out how to burn an image to.

The game you're describing is called Pier Solar. Pretty neat, plus you can change the graphics to 16 bit if thats your thing. Short and sweet game, rarely does the DC scene get RPGs. This is now a DC thread.

Makes sense, if the price of the average SNES repro is any indication, it'd be heavy cost to produce large numbers of "blank" cartridges, let alone produce large numbers of cartridges with content on them. And the issue of hardware availability is a valid concern as well. But in the case of the hardware issue, software moves hardware and one reason for the influx of mock SNES or Genesis retro consoles has been the existence of a demand among enough consumers for affordable replacements for those old consoles to play their game libraries on.

If you were trying to resurrect the SNES for example, what you'd need to do is to take things more slowly than you would with something like the Dreamcast so you don't gouge your wallet, because of the issues you mentioned. But I think it's still possible for anyone who has the investment capital, the love for the SNES and the talent to actually generate quality games and market them to the right demographic with the right amount of disposable income.

Really it seems to me that part of the problem with resurrecting any old console is that while there may be people who love these consoles and maybe try to make some kind of love letter here and there to them, there probably aren't a lot of developers who are business savvy enough to know what they need to do to see their favorite consoles revived in a way that is systematic and economical. Keep in mind that really, ALL home consoles are technically obsolete hardware. With home consoles, it's always been a mixture of quality and/or exclusive software and talented marketing teams who know how to sell these boxes repackaged out of date hardware components to more mainstream markets with smaller budgets. In the case of seriously reviving an old console and pushing new exclusive or timed exclusive software for it, the same kind of talent would probably be needed.

i think dealing with opposition markets would be a major hurdle even if you made a very good product.
as a consumer it's still very weird to see xbox/ps4 controllers shilled so hard in the controller threads.

Good point, the mock consoles were something I had forgotten to take into account entirely. That said, I think your assertion that it takes someone with the money, ideas, and developmental skill and dedication is still wrong - even if someone like that exists, it usually takes several games to make it worth buying a console, even a mock console. It would need to be a large developer movement toward the old console, and convincing nostalgic developers (of which there are many) that a) it's better to develop for a console that is out of print than to make a game for modern consoles/PC with a retro aesthetic, b) it's worth the investment, both in learning the old console and paying for the cartridge creation, and c) which old console they should all build for. That's not to mention that most nostalgic devs aren't going to have the cash to invest in creating carts in the first place.

Or basically: I agree with your assertion about the kind of person it takes, as long as you add that it takes several such investors, not just one.

I would say that in the case of the cart consoles and their larger costs, the best strategy would be to just start consistently releasing limited print runs of carts of your game as a kind of promotional gimmick aimed at that niche demographic of retro and hardcore gamers. before you put your game up for mass distribution on an online service. If you do this consistently that that market can rely on you give them first dibs on a good game and have more use for their original or duplicate console, you may find that your print of let's just say 200 carts a year divided over 2 separate print runs gradually increases to something more like 400 a year and so on depending on just how reasonably that market can be expected to increase. Then of course you might use clever tactics to provide incentives to purchase the version of the game that's on the old console over the digital one by marketing them as a more special edition versions of the game, a tactic best used once it's clear that there's a reliable fanbase for your studio's titles across all the platforms you may develop for.

This same kind of tactic might work with all old consoles, be they CD or cartridge based, and in fact that seems to be something that the developers who are trying to revive the dreamcast are trying to do to some degree. The problem is a lot of the development teams trying to revive the Dreamcast are too small to have an impact. HUCAST, one of the more well known indie dreamcast revivalists, was like, one dude doing the development, marketing, production and distribution. It would effectively take a small starter company of a few dozen people at the least to set off a trend towards reviving any older console.